When Jessie Vogt was a kid, one of her coaches at Boulder's Singletrack Mountain Bike Adventures (SMBA) used to ride behind her on long uphills singing “Eye of the Tiger.”

She re-enacted the scene for me: Hands gripping invisible handlebars, torso grooving to the imaginary music just a little bit, but not too much since she was storming up a hill on her bike.

“Most people know just the “eye of the tiger” part, but he knew every single word,” Vogt said. “And he'd sing it up the entire climb.”

It stayed with her.

“Even when I started road racing at CU, on hills I would be, 'eye of the tiger,'” she sang.

Now, Jessie is one of those coaches for kids in SMBA -- they pronounce the acronym “simba” -- and she's started SMBA's first all-girls mountain bike team. No word yet on what she sings to them on climbs, but they did all ride dressed up like bugs recently.

“SMBA made such a difference in my life,” Jessie said.

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“It gave me confidence, it gave me access to opportunities in college, in racing, in traveling and experiencing cultures around the world.”

“I think that's why I love this program -- because I went through it, and I can look back and see what a benefit it was for me. So if these kids can take away even one percent of that, I'm psyched.”

When I met Jessie at one of Bacaro's Sunday rides, she told me her mission was to get more girls racing mountain bikes. The girls team is a step in that direction. It's open to all girls, ages 9 through 17, whether they've mountain biked before or not, she said.

“Trying something new is so scary, at any age,” she said. “I find this program helps a lot of the sisters of the boys on the team get into it, because they're like, ‘oh, it's just for my brothers and his friends.'”

“But I also think it helps to have the leadership of someone who is older and has been there and can say, ‘yeah, it's scary, I fell on my face, but it's OK.'”

The all-girls team, along with SMBA's other youth mountain biking teams and camps, just wrapped up the first session of the spring.

“The girls are having so much fun,” Jessie told me. “I almost cry every single time. They're so rad -- just the enthusiasm, and how excited the girls get when they get to the bottom of a hill, or the top of a hill, is amazing. Plus, girls are huge fans of high-fives, and I like that.”

The SMBA boys think the girls team is cool, too, she said. On the first day of the season, at the top of a hill, one of the boys said to a girl on the team, “go ahead, you go first.”

The girls team is exciting, but there's a lot going on with SMBA right now. On Thursday, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a fundraiser for them with cocktails and bike art, including work by local artists Anthony Grant, Jennifer Rudkin (the parent of a SMBA kid) and Peter Steele. All of the artists will be at the BMoCA event on Thursday, she said, as will the woman behind Shredly mountain bike shorts for women, which have awesome, out-there designs.

“We wanted to do something classy, fun,” Jessie said of the fundraiser. “Most of our fundraisers are like, kids! Crazy! Mayhem! So it's a nice change for our supporters to get to come and have a fancy evening.”

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